Microsoft Research India takes digital tours to a new level

The India Digital Heritage Project is a huge undertaking by Microsoft Research India that tries to "collect, store, and share data on architectural sites and stimulate research in visualization, computer vision, graphics and related fields." Various academic and industry research organizations formed a Program Advisory & Monitoring Committee to monitor the project. MSR India's role is to provide technologies such as Photosynth and HD View (beta) to help showcase various Indian heritage sites in both 2D and 3D. At time of publishing, the project encompasses five sites with either Photosynth or HD View (beta) examples. If you don't feel like installing either, you can check out a demonstration video for the city of Srivilliputtur (its primary landmark is a tall Gopuram or "Temple Tower"), embedded below.

Users can choose to follow a "guided-tour" where a narrator explains the historical and cultural importance of what is being viewed. As you can see, the potential of this project is really phenomenal. Slideshows of pictures and videos really aren't enough for digital tours of landmarks, but putting together technologies like Photosynth and HD View (beta) can seriously improve the experience. The engineers, researchers, and designers that had to work to put this together have only recently finished a pilot prototype for the Sri Andal Temple in Srivilliputtur. There is still a lot of work to do if this is to be used commercially.

HD View, developed by Microsoft Research's Interactive Visual Media group, is a viewer meant for large images (think billions of pixels) that have been stitched together using smaller images. Photosynth, on the other hand, is a technology that analyzes and pieces together multiple images of an area or object from multiple angles to create virtual worlds called a "synth." The latter has actually undergone an update recently, with "a lot more features and improvements in the works."